Main Navigation

The following excerpt is from an article that originally appeared on Hit and Run Reason

As part of the budget proposal unveiled earlier this week, the Trump administration is calling for a radical overhaul of so-called “food stamps” that would have the U.S. Department of Agriculture shipping boxes of nonperishable food to low-income Americans every month.

The problem here isn’t the general idea of reforming the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). The Government Accountability Office has raised red flags about abuse of SNAP benefits, and the U.S. Department of Agricuture’s inspector general says “the magnitude of program abuse due to recipient fraud is unknown,” in part because states do not have uniform reporting requirements about beneficiaries. There’s also a glorious history of outrage journalism focused on particularly egregious abuses of the SNAP system, like the infamous California surfer dude who told Fox News in 2013 that he was eating lobster on the taxpayers’